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DATE Established in 1874; constructed mostly from the 1870’s to the 1920’s

Oheka Castle is a restored historic estate in West Hills, New York, a hamlet within the town of Huntington. It was originally completed in 1919. It sometimes referred to as the Otto Kahn estate. The estate was originally constructed by investor and banker Otto Hermann Kahn, who constructed the property in imitation of European palaces. He used Oheka Castle as a summer home and as a place to entertain royalty and foreign dignitaries. However, after his death, the banker’s family had little interest in the estate. For this reason, ownership of Oheka Castle fell to the state.

DATE Incorporated in 1786

DATE Original fort existed from 1755 to 1781

DATE Original wall erected across the northern end of New Amsterdam in 1644

DATE Hyde Park first settled by Europeans about 1700; Roosevelt born on January 30, 1882

DATE August 15-17, 1969

Location: New York City, New York County

DATE Battles fought on September 19 and October 7, 1777

DATE First settled by the Dutch in 1629

DATE Settled by the Dutch in 1636; incorporated as a village and named Nieuw Haarlem by Peter Stuyvesant in 1658; annexed to New York City in 1873

DATE Established as a National Memorial on April 27, 1962

DATE Built between 1929 and 1940

DATE Founded in 1963

DATE United Nations founded on October 24, 1945; headquarters completed in 1950

DATE Construction begun in 1897

Dominated by the nation’s most heavily populated city, New York has been an area of economic and political importance since the earliest years of the United States. Its position between the Atlantic Ocean and the Great Lakes made it a major area of population movement to the west, and New York City attracts emigrants from around the world.

IDENTIFICATION A system of artificial waterways from Buffalo on Lake Erie to Albany on the Hudson River providing transportation between the less-developed interior of New York and the eastern seaboard

Summary: A naturalized American citizen from Pakistan, Faisal Shahzad, pleaded guilty to planting a car bomb in the middle of Times Square on Saturday evening, May 1, 2010. He told a federal court judge that he had received training to make the bomb from Tehrik-i-Taliban, a coalition of Islamist fundamentalist groups generally known as the Pakistan Taliban. Shahzad said he was acting as a "Muslim soldier" who wanted to retaliate for American attacks in Muslim countries, including Afghanistan and Iraq. Sidewalk vendors in Times Square alerted police to a Nissan Pathfinder SUV filling with smoke while parked in New York's theater district, its engine running. Police defused a device inside the vehicle comprising canisters of gasoline, bags of fertilizer, cans of propane, and firecrackers. Police quickly traced ownership of the Pathfinder to Shahzad and arrested him on a plane already on the tarmac and about to depart for Dubai on May 3, just 53 hours after police were alerted to the incident. The charges to which Shahzad pleaded guilty carry a mandatory life term; formal sentencing was scheduled for October 2010.

As the Industrial Revolution unfolded in the United States, many poor urban children left school to work in factories and stores to help support their families. As new federal and state laws required school attendance for children of certain ages and restricted labor outside the home during the academic year, child labor shifted to home manufacturing—a practice where goods manufacturers provided finishing work on a piecemeal basis to anyone who could complete it. Since child-labor laws did not prohibit this practice, many children who left factory work were forced into long hours of after-school labor helping their parents finish goods at home. In conjunction with several reform organizations and government agencies, Mary Van Kleeck authored the report “Child Labor in New York City Tenements” to uncover the truths behind this practice, hoping to protect children from unfair labor practices and improve their chances of obtaining a proper education.

Emerging from the 4:00 A.M. darkness on May 10, 1775, Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys caught the British by surprise and captured Fort Ticonderoga, at the junction of Lake Champlain and Lake George, in the first offensive action of the American Revolution. Benedict Arnold, later best known as a traitor to the American cause, helped conceive the action and was among those who crossed with Allen from the Vermont to the New York side of Lake Champlain to participate in the daring exploit. This first American victory in the war not only yielded control of vital waterways leading to Canada and to New York City, it also provided the colonists with badly needed cannons, which were dragged the following winter all the way to Boston. There they were crucial in the action of Dorchester Heights that resulted in expulsion of the British.

Times Square is a major hub of New York City located in the Midtown Manhattan borough at Broadway and Seventh Avenue, spanning to West 42nd and West 47th Streets. While the area experienced a decline in the early twentieth century that persisted for several decades, Times Square has since been revitalized and redeveloped into one of the busiest and most popular sites in the world. Marked by its theater district, huge illuminated advertisements, New Year's Eve celebration, and other attractions, it is a top tourist destination, drawing millions of visitors each year. Times Square. By Epicgenius, CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), via Wikimedia Commons Times Square as seen from top step of bleachers on rear of TKTS booth. By Hisland7, CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/), via Wikimedia Commons

On April 6, 1984, fifty-seven of the world’s leading paleoanthropologists gathered at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City to study forty of the most important early human fossils found up to that time. Contrary to popular belief, the fossil remains of early human and near-human beings are extremely rare, owing to the very special set of circumstances that must occur for a fossil to form and be preserved and the great difficulties involved in finding the fossils that do exist. These few precious relics of human antiquity are scattered among the world’s great museums, carefully guarded by museum curators. Consequently, most scientists and scholars who study and write about the evolution of the human species have never had the opportunity to study firsthand the evidence on which their discipline is based. The symposium held in New York in 1984 marked the first time in history that most of the important fossils relating to early humans and humanlike creatures had been available for direct study by the world’s foremost authorities on early forms of humans.

A handful of entrepreneurs at Coney Island, New York, created the modern amusement park, with its mechanical wonders and exotic architecture. Coney Island’s entertainment formulas became so deeply ingrained in American culture that by the 1920s, park operators throughout the United States and around the world had copied them, many unabashedly appropriating the names of the resort’s amusement parks. Though it later fell out of popularity and became neglected, by the twenty-first century efforts were being contributed to revive the area. Coney Island as seen from the pier in June 2016. By MusikAnimal, CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), via Wikimedia Commons Coney Island from the air. By Psychocadet, CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0), via Wikimedia Commons

In the 1960s, Canarsie—a neighborhood in southeast Brooklyn, one of the five boroughs of New York City—was home to some sixty thousand working-class and middle-class Jewish Jewish Americans and Italian American Italian Americans people. Many of them had left other Brooklyn neighborhoods— Brownsville, East New York, and East Flatbush—because those neighborhoods had become racially integrated. For various reasons, these whites did not wish to live among African Americans. It was an unusual alliance: Many of the Italian Americans were politically and socially conservative, and many of the Jews were liberal and active in the Civil Rights movement. The two groups lived peaceably together until the late 1960s, when poor African Americans African Americans started to move into Canarsie. Canarsie riots

At 9:43 p.m. on a sultry Wednesday evening, July 13, 1977, a massive power failure hit New York City and its boroughs. With temperatures in the mid-nineties and the humidity high, New Yorkers sweltered, and, before power was restored at 10:14 p.m. on the following evening, the city was without power for more than twenty-five hours.

King's College, later known as Columbia University, opened on July 17, 1754, in New York City after several years of controversy. The New York colonial legislature in 1746 made provisions to raise money for the school through public lotteries. The colony amassed 17,000 British pounds within five years and gave it to the trustees, but disagreements threatened the future of the project. Dissenting Protestants felt uneasy about the role of the Church of England in the administration of the institution: two -thirds of the trustees were Anglicans and some were even vestrymen of Trinity Church. William Livingston, a lawyer, Presbyterian, and member of the leading family in the colony, argued for a liberal nonsectarian college in a series of articles in the newspaper known as the Independent Reflector. In reality, Livingston merely wanted to prevent the establishment of an Anglican college, but he argued in libertarian terms. He stated that a sectarian institution would intensify animosities in the religiously heterogeneous province and perhaps enable the faction that controlled higher education to dominate the colony. Livingston envisioned a college established by the colonial assembly as the most desirable solution since it would make it possible for all factions to have a voice in educational matters.

Located on Long Island in New York, the first Levittown community was the brainchild of William Levitt. Levitt, with his father, Abraham, and brother Alfred, was part of the successful real estate development firm of Levitt and Sons. Before the war, the firm had specialized in building upscale housing on Long Island. In 1941, the firm won a wartime government contract to build sixteen hundred houses for workers at the Norfolk shipyard. The Levitts figured out how to streamline the building process to make it more similar to mass production. Instead of building one house at a time, they divided the building process into twenty-seven steps and trained twenty-seven teams of workers, one to carry out each step.

Lydia Feliciano worked the coat check at Happy Land, one of dozens of so-called social clubs in New York City, neighborhood ethnic clubs that sold large quantities of untaxed liquor in facilities that often did not meet minimum safety codes. Happy Land had operated under the radar for years (although it had been investigated in 1988 and its operators told to shut down as it had no sprinklers or fire alarms and insufficient fire exits). Early on the morning of March 25, 1990, club patrons—no one knows exactly how many—crowded the tiny (sixty-by-twenty-foot) hall to celebrate Carnivale, a festival akin to Mardi Gras. Feliciano’s on-again, off-again boyfriend of six years, Julio González, a Cuban army deserter and ex-con who had just lost his job at a Queens lamp factory, argued with her about her working at the club.

The Civil Rights movement, in bringing attention to the inequality of legally imposed segregation in the South, also highlighted the de facto discrimination that affected the economic status and living conditions of African Americans in northern and western cities. Many African Americans became somewhat frustrated with the slow pace of the struggle for civil rights.

The Adirondack Mountains make up a roughly circular mountain range in upstate New York. In the past, the mountains were important to the fur-trapping, mining, and logging industries, and they later began to attract tourists. The mountains are situated within Adirondack Park, which the state of New York created in 1892 to preserve the region. The Adirondack Mountains are home to thousands of lakes; thousands of miles of rivers and streams; more than forty peaks with elevations of 4,000 feet (1,219 meters) or higher; and numerous species of animals, birds, fish, and plants. The Adirondack region is a popular tourist destination with millions of visitors each year. It is especially well-liked among outdoor enthusiasts, including mountain climbers, hikers, hunters, and campers. Adirondacks in Essex County, New York. By Alec Perkins, CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), via Wikimedia Commons Whiteface Mountain is one of the high peaks of the Adirondack Mountains. By Mwanner, CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0), via Wikimedia Commons

By the mid-nineteenth century, New York City was the largest and most prosperous city in the Western Hemisphere. The recently completed Erie Canal linked the Great Lakes with the Hudson River and positioned New York City as the gateway between the Midwest and the Atlantic Ocean. Rapidly developing industrialization, coupled with increasing trade with Europe, created a generation of newly wealthy New Yorkers who were eager to compete with “old money” New Yorkers for social status at home and with their European counterparts for cultural recognition abroad.

Crown Heights, a racially mixed section of Brooklyn, New York, began to experience civil unrest in the late 1980s. Many of the residents were either low-income Black individuals who immigrated from Caribbean countries or Lubavitchers, Orthodox (Hasidic) Jews who maintained a strong religious identity reflected in their dress and their insularity. Both groups have been subject to stereotyping and victimized by discrimination, from both within and outside the Crown Heights community. Relations between Jewish and Black residents in the community were tense. Black leaders charged that Lubavitchers had received better treatment from local authorities than that accorded Black residents, and Hasidic leaders countered that Black antisemitism had made Lubavitchers victims of street crimes and subject to continual harassment.

DATE National Historic Site established by Congress in 1977 and opened on October 11, 1984

DATE Work on the site began in 1857; first phase opened in 1858

LAWYER AND POLITICIAN

SIGNIFICANCE: The history of immigration into the state of New York has been dominated by immigration into New York City, where about 90 percent of the state's immigrant population lives. The rest of the state has had a somewhat different but significant immigration history.

New York, one of the thirteen original colonies, entered the Union on July 26, 1788, the eleventh state to join. Part of the Mid-Atlantic region of the northeastern United States, New York shares land boundaries with five other states and two Canadian provinces: Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont to the east; New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south; Ontario to the northwest; and Quebec to the north. Water borders include the Atlantic Ocean on the east and Lakes Erie and Ontario on the northwest.

On August 29, 1929, The New York Times headlined an announcement that the Empire State Corporation would begin construction on an important commercial venture at Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, site of the famous Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The five New York financiers involved intended to erect the world’s tallest building on the two-acre site. Their plan was to offer prestigious rental office space in a skyscraper that would embody the richness and achievement of New York, the Empire State. When it opened during the Great Depression, the Empire State Building represented an image of strength and spirit of which New Yorkers and, by extension, all Americans could be proud.

Zoning is a system of regulations that place restrictions on the ways in which land can be used and on the height, bulk, area, and placement of buildings on the land. Zoning ordinances are probably the most widely used tools that local governments have to protect the environment.

A large interconnected network of power plants and high-voltage transmission lines provides electricity to the northeastern United States and Canada. On November 9, 1965, a faulty circuit breaker triggered a sequence of events that brought the whole system to a halt within ten minutes.

The firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, Civil War at the beginning of the Civil War, came at a time when the regular US Army numbered only about sixteen thousand officers and troops. The traditional method of increasing the size of the army was to expand the state militias and to form a volunteer emergency national army recruited through the states. The immediate response of President Abraham Lincoln Lincoln, Abraham to the firing on Fort Sumter was to call for seventy-five thousand militia volunteers for three months’ service. This call was exceeded, and some volunteers were turned away because the expectation was that a show of force would be sufficient to defeat the South. Congress and the president subsequently found it necessary, however, to call for more volunteers. Repeated defeats of the Union army and the resultant loss of men caused President Lincoln to call for three hundred thousand volunteers in the summer of 1862. The difficulty of obtaining volunteers was soon apparent; bounties were increased, and the threat of the draft was invoked. Congress passed the Militia Act Militia Act of July 1862, which allowed the states to draft men into the militia and encouraged enlistments. President Lincoln called for another three hundred thousand men to be enrolled into the militia. Although the Militia Act of 1862 gave the federal government power to enroll men in situations where the state machinery was inadequate, the short-term (nine-month maximum) nature of the militia draft and the inequities of the system made it less than satisfactory. Race riots of the twentieth century Draft riot

Albany, New York, is located at a strategic crossroads of navigable waterways and overland transportation routes. The area was the object of several early colonization efforts. In 1540 the French established a short-lived trading post in the area. The region reverted to wilderness until 1609, when Henry Hudson sailed the ship Half Moon 142 miles up the river that today bears his name. He claimed the territory around Albany, and within five years his Dutch employers and sponsors had established a trading post, Fort Nassau. The Dutch abandoned the post in 1619, however. The first actual settlers were 18 families sent by the Dutch West India Company, who arrived in 1624.

Obed Hussey of Maryland exhibited a reaper in public for the first time on July 2, 1833, on the grounds of the Hamilton County Agricultural Society in New York state. Late in December of that same year, he obtained a patent on the reaper.

Long Island Sound is an estuary located between the shores of New York and Connecticut to the north, and Long Island to the south. An estuary is a place where freshwater from rivers meets and mixes with ocean saltwater. Estuaries are complex ecosystems that many species use as breeding, feeding, and nursery areas. More than fifteen hundred species of creatures live in Long Island Sound at least part of the year, while more than twenty-three million people live within fifty miles of its shores.

Female prisoners have tended historically to be a neglected and negligible group. Women have made up but a small part of the prison population in all countries. Because they have tended to be such a minority in the criminal justice system, their special needs as a specific group have not been met. Although nonincarcerated women have sought to help female prisoners in various ways, the treatment of incarcerated women has gone through the same cycles as the treatment of male prisoners.

The first Jewish settlers of record in New Amsterdam were Jacob Barsimon and Solomon Pieterson, both of whom came from Holland in the summer of 1654. The next month, twenty-three other Jews arrived, both old and young, refugees from the Portuguese conquest of Dutch Brazil (New Holland), which had been the richest property of the Dutch West India Company in America. After leaving Recife, Brazil, their ship had been captured by Spanish pirates, from whom they were saved by a French privateer, the Saint Charles, captained by Jacques de La Motthe. Having little more than the clothes on their backs, the Jewish migrants convinced La Motthe to carry them to New Amsterdam for twenty-five hundred guilders, which they hoped to borrow in that Dutch port. They shortly discovered, however, what Jacob Barsimon and Solomon Pieterson were already learning: There was much opposition to Jews settling in New Netherland.

On the weekend of July 23–25, 1999, roughly 220,000 people came to Griffiss Technology Park in Rome, New York, for Woodstock 1999. The event was intended to recapture the spirit of the 1960s on the thirtieth anniversary of Woodstock 1969. The concert began without incident, but just several hours into the three-day event, concertgoers became agitated as a few of the promised acts failed to appear. Additionally, temperatures in the area that weekend hovered around 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and audience members complained about the high price of food and water. Before the festival ended on Sunday, rioting, looting of vendors’ trailers, sexual assaults, bonfires, injuries, and arrests had made Woodstock 1999 far removed from its 1969 predecessor.

Situated a mere 12 miles (20 kilometers) from New York City, Shu Swamp is one of the few remaining intact red maple-blackgum swamps on Long Island. The name Shu is a corruption of the Dutch word sheogh, which means “cascading waters.” This type of wetland can be found along the North Atlantic coast of the United States from New Jersey to New Hampshire. In New York State, red maple-blackgum swamps are restricted to 20 or 30 sites, primarily on Long Island.

The Susquehanna River is a long river located in the northeastern United States. The Susquehanna begins in New York and flows through Pennsylvania, meeting several tributaries and a secondary branch, before reaching the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland and emptying into the Atlantic Ocean. The river has been a central point of human activity since nomadic groups of Native Americans first used the area more than ten thousand years ago. Later, European American inhabitants used the river extensively for industry, shipping, and transportation, largely via an extensive network of canals. The river remains a popular recreational area in modern times, although it has faced serious pollution problems. Major floods of the river in 1972 and 2011 brought widespread damage to nearby communities. Susquehanna River. By Nicholas A. Tonelli, CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), via Wikimedia Commons